Online Petition Launches After India Bans Cryptocurrency

India’s cryptocurrency users are not happy with the decision of the central bank to ban cryptocurrencies. They have started an online petition on Change.org to get signatures and persuade the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to change their decision. The petition statement declares that the distributed ledger technology knows no boundaries.

Crypto and blockchain as a concept can’t be stopped. You can just decide whether you want to participate with full throttle or get left behind. The current stance from the government shows they would want to remain left behind after missing the internet revolution first, AI revolution next and now blockchain revolution.

On April 5th, RBI announced that organizations that were dealing with cryptocurrencies would not be entertained by the bank. The press release explained that such technological developments were ground-breaking, however, they posed great risks for users. RBI’s deputy governor, Bibhu Prasad Kanungo, said in a press conference, “… they [cryptocurrencies] can seriously undermine the AML (anti-money laundering) and FATF (Financial Action Task Force) framework, adversely impact market integrity and capital control. And if they grow beyond a critical size, they can endanger financial stability as well.”

Indian citizens immediately spoke out against the ban and requested RBI to take a step forward into the future with blockchain technology. Tim Draper also expressed his thoughts on the matter, calling it a bad decision. He said that if he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he would tell him that the country was making a “huge mistake”.

Draper encouraged Indian government to support innovation, otherwise, its citizens would be employed or move to other cryptocurrency-friendly countries. “They have the choice to be trendsetters and attract the world’s best engineers and coders, or lose their best and brightest to other regions,” said Draper. He went as far as stating that the national currency of India should be Bitcoin.